


just like the ones i used to know

by arbitrarily



Category: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
Genre: Established Friends with Benefits Relationship, Flashbacks, M/M, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21534904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: A brief history of two men and the end of the 1960s.
Relationships: Cliff Booth/Rick Dalton
Comments: 15
Kudos: 95
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	just like the ones i used to know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GotTheSilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GotTheSilver/gifts).



> Title from "White Christmas." 
> 
> I hope you have a very happy holiday and a happy Yuletide!

i.

“Looks like it’s just you and me, amigo.”

“Yup.” Cliff gives his can of beer a shake. Empty. “Looks like it.” He reaches for another—passes a can to Rick, too. 

Rick takes to divorce with much the same disinterest that Cliff took to being a widower. It’s less a comment on the women who served as their wives, but more so on themselves. 

Francesca left early that fall. Maybe one month after The Incident. Rick took to calling it that, “The Incident,” capitalized letters and all. Made it sound like some inconsequential thing they fell into, like that time Cliff had to post bail for Rick and they suspended his license (“They acted like they didn’t even fucking know me,” Rick’s biggest gripe the entire ride home) or that time and the thing out in Las Vegas they both agreed to never speak of again (and haven’t), or that one long February weekend jointly lost in Palm Springs. The Incident was just another goddamn thing that happened to them. 

Francesca did not feel similar about The Incident. Not by a long shot. She said she wanted to go back to Rome where everything was old and beautiful and she could eat spaghetti and teenagers didn’t break into people’s houses with the intent to kill anybody. Or at least that was what Cliff assumed she said; he doesn’t know any Italian worth a damn.

“Now, that just sounds downright boring, you ask me.” But no one had asked Cliff. By then—when Francesca spent her mornings facedown in Seconal and her afternoons at the drained pool in the backyard ranting about attempted murder and Roman architecture and the scorch marks Cliff needed to finish painting over and her nights out on the town and on Dexedrine—Cliff was living with them. 

After everything—and everything included a whole hell of a lot—and when he was discharged from the hospital with if not a clean bill of health then the belief he was gonna live (as well as a filled prescription for enough little pills to make any _Valley of the Dolls_ acolyte cheer with muffled narcotic glee) Rick had come out to the trailer in Van Nuys for the first and the only time.

Truth be told, Cliff didn’t even know that Rick knew where he lived. That is just the kind of relationship they have: Cliff knows every single absolute last detail about Rick, and Rick knows what Rick wants to know about Cliff. Cliff can live with that. There are more than enough things about himself he wouldn’t mind pardoned from the record.

“Look, buddy,” Rick had said that day. He rested his arm against the doorframe and then just as quickly stepped aside, like contact hepatitis or tetanus was something he might need to worry about. “This arrangement just won’t do.” That was fine by Cliff. He’d yet to meet a suggestion posed by Rick he wasn’t willing to follow. And so Cliff, and Brandy, moved into Rick’s. Francesca hated that, and of course she did. With Cliff there, she was more Rick’s accessory, like an expensive potted plant or ceramic vase or the small illustration sketched behind Rick on their shared movie poster, than wife. 

That was fine by Cliff, too.

ii.

Rick gets a call from NBC that fall. They’re doing a Christmas variety hour special, headlined by Bing Crosby, decrepit as all hell but still crooning. They already got Carol Burnett on the roster, and somewhere amidst the list of available talent, they thought: Rick Dalton. 

“What the hell they want the likes of me there for?” 

“You’re Jake Cahill!” the NBC rep says. “Or, you were! Nothing says the holidays like a good old gunslinger shuffling in out of retirement.” Beside Rick, his agent groans. The NBC rep hunches forward. “That, and if you wanna get cute here, NBC’s still got you on contract, ergo, your nuts in a vise. Merry Christmas, just do the fucking show.”

He will relay all of this, in extensive and exacting and potentially exaggerated detail, to Cliff somewhere between the backlot offices and the winding uphill curve of Cielo Drive. 

“Retirement!” Rick slurs the word and then slams the passenger side door of his car. Cliff ambles along the front to the driver’s side. “He said that goddamn word to me, like I’d know what it means.”

“I’m assuming you do know what it means, considering you’re a bright enough man and all. You read things.”

“You know exactly what I am talking about. Jesus Christ, he said I’m retired. I’d be coming out of retirement. Goddamn it all to hell. Doesn’t he know I do Italian movies now? I am still in the fucking picture, that’s what I should’ve told him. I never fucking left.”

Cliff slots the keys into the ignition. “What did you tell him?”

“What do you think? I’d do the goddamn show.”

Cliff shakes his head, near laughter, as he puts the car in gear.

iii.

Soon it will be 1970, and Rick says that often, the same way an older man—a decrepit Bing Crosby maybe—would say, “And soon we’ll all be dead.”

Rick got to do a bunch of news spots, after that whole thing. The Incident. The story was irresistible: _Bounty Law_ star and his stunt double fended off a trio of Satan-worshipping, acid-tripping hippies in their own home. Rick played macho humility well in those interviews. He looked good; Cliff’s not above admitting it.

One afternoon, Joan Didion came out to the place. She was writing a book, she said, about the end of the 1960s. She thought this was the sort of story worth including in it. 

“It’s a mighty violent tale, ma’am,” Rick said. “I wouldn’t want to offend any sensibilities.”

“I am not concerned about my sensibilities.” Joan didn’t blink.

An awkward pause stretched before Rick laughed. “Alright. Alright, then. Well, you’re in luck. I kept the flamethrower. You wanna see it?”

She did.

iv.

They’re alone most nights, more often than not. Sometimes Rick stops by, next door, but not often and not since Sharon mentioned they’d be moving again soon. He took it as a personal slight that Cliff has abandoned attempting to diffuse. “Everyone gets to move on, you know,” Rick said that night. “Everyone but me.”

The dog food dropped noisily from the can and (mostly) into Brandy’s dish. 

“You’re moving on too, brother.”

Rick never sees it that way. Rick worries about the future the way most old men do after they’ve recognized a changing of the guard. Cliff doesn’t worry like that. He, Rick has told him, lacks the constitution. It’s more a lack of fame and the corresponding ego, but Cliff doesn’t talk like that to Rick. 

Mostly, he listens.

v.

Rick has started dating again. With the divorce finalized and Francesca an ocean away, it’s time he got back out there again. Or, at least, that’s what Rick says. He’s declared the intention to start dating again. He’s yet to find a woman to bring such a declaration to fruition. 

Neither gets a reaction out of Cliff. That’s a fairly new development.

Back in the day, back when Rick Dalton was hot shit in this town and Cliff was just beginning to learn the totality of what that meant, they met for drinks. Rick was fresh from a meeting with his agent and with the studio and he slid into the booth with a shit-eating grin. He unceremoniously set out an array of headshots like a perp line-up of half-a-year’s worth of Playmates on the lam from the Mansion. 

“What am I looking at here?” Cliff asked. 

“My future, partner.” Rick smirked, a low laugh escaping him as he took a deep inhale off his cigarette. He told Cliff about it then, in detail. The endless bounty of celebrity, how they told him he had to date one of these girls. “It’ll help the profile,” he said with the self-centered seriousness that came lock-step with this industry. 

The next night, Rick went out with the lone redhead in the assortment. And Cliff went out that night, too. He goaded the first square jaw he spotted in the worst bar he found to fight him.

If you ask Cliff—and no one ever does—violence has always been easier than self-assessment.

vi.

They only ever did one interview together. _Bounty Law_ was at its peak, and Cliff didn’t much care for trying to put into words what it meant to work with Rick. 

When it came down to it, intimacy always was an easy thing for Cliff to wear when it came to Rick. For a good long time he chalked that up to why he worked as a successful double. To double a man, you had to be him, and to be him—you had to know him.

Cliff met Rick back when they did _Tanner_. That was the first time he doubled for him. The part required Cliff to leap from one running horse to another, all while firing his pistol. Cliff got it in one, which was just as impressive a surprise to him as it was to Rick. After whooping and hollering, Rick told Cliff he was gonna take him out to dinner that night. “I gotta toast the man who is me in all the ways I cannot be.” It was some real poetic shit, and who was Cliff to turn that down—let alone the promise of a free steak dinner and a couple of drinks. 

They were inseparable after that. Rick loved the stories of Cliff’s failed acting career, like he was considering his own failed path not taken. Any career that Cliff had after that, and after his wife’s death, was strictly attributable to Rick. Rick was a workhorse, and there was little he could work better than the Hollywood machine. Cliff wasn’t against hard work, but goddamn, he hated the politics of it all. The studio meetings and the producers in their suits and shoes shined so bright you knew they’d stepped wrong into shit or done a real day’s work beyond sitting behind a desk and decided who’s money went where and who’s picture was gonna make it to the big screen and which restaurant was gonna serve them a shrimp cocktail that night. Cliff had no patience for men like that, but Rick did.

Sometimes, it was like Rick was a softer version of Cliff, or Cliff was a harder version of him. They were drawn to every bit of each other they could never personally possess. Take, for example, the fact that Rick was fascinated by Cliff’s scars. He wanted the story to accompany each of them, even when the story was worth less than the telling of it. That was probably how and why they fucked that first time. That, and the mezcal.

vii.

It’s a warm afternoon in October when Cliff picks Rick up at the soundstage. A woman dressed as Mrs. Claus pulls her wig off and shakes out her hair as she crosses the lot.

Rick storms towards the car. He flicks his cigarette to the pavement before he throws himself into the passenger-side seat.

“I've never been so goddamn humiliated," he fumes. "We can’t watch it. I won’t allow it.” He scrubs a hand through his hair before he turns his head to look over at Cliff with all the solemness and grief in the world, or at least to be found in Los Angeles. "You shouldn’t have to see me like that.”

viii.

“Hey, man," Cliff calls. "It’s starting.”

Sleigh bells jingle and jangle, and it’s corny as all hell, enough tinsel to detail a flying saucer. Cliff chuckles appreciably at all the clunky one-liners Bing and Rick deliver. Rick doesn’t. He gestures towards the television set, his cigarette hanging off his bottom lip.

“You know—you know who you’d never see? Doing this shit? Paul Newman. Robert Redford.”

Cliff scoffs. He tosses a handful of popcorn in the general direction of his mouth. Most kernels miss. “Only ‘cause no one fucking asked. Give ‘em five years. You’ll see.”

“You give Newman five years, you give Redford five years, you gotta give me five years, and where the hell’s that get me? I’m old. I’m dead. I’m out of the business—”

“Ah, come on, man. It’s Christmas.”

Rick stills, his can of beer raised to his mouth. On the TV, Bing and Carol are singing about hauling out the holly and Rick’s standing awkwardly beside a small table set with cookies for Santa. “It’s November 30th.”

ix.

Rick may make for a morose drunk, but he’s also a handsy one. Affectionate and needy, and that’s fine. Cliff is the kind of drunk who likes to be touched. He likes Rick’s hands.

Besides, it’s just as easy to stroke his ego as it is his cock. Cliff knows this. The night Rick met Steve McQueen for the first time, Cliff jacked Rick off in the front seat of his car, parked in Rick’s driveway. The night was an exercise in crushed morale and self-esteem and probably, redundantly, manhood, even though nothing really happened beyond an introduction. But Cliff could read the room as he knew Rick did and all Rick saw were bygones. Motherfucking bygones. 

“‘You’ll still be here when I get out?’” Rick muttered the line under his breath as Cliff started the car. Cliff knew that Rick saw _The Great Escape_ at least the once; Rick had never been needier than that evening after the matinee, wanting nothing more than for Cliff to tell him how good he was—on his knees, or otherwise. “‘You’ll still be here when I get out?’” He repeated that line again and again, and while his inflection changed slightly each time it never wavered, even as Cliff deliberately cut too sharp across traffic, the light bleeding yellow to red.

x.

“I didn’t think, didn’t think, you know, that’d be the sort of thing to get you going.” Rick laughs self-consciously. Cliff snorts. He pictures Rick in the fur-lined hat they made him wear, the green jacket to match, contrasting against Bing’s red costume.

“It’s not,” Cliff says. He considers biting at Rick’s mouth. He gives in, does it. Rick shifts into him, greedy. 

Cliff, unlike the rest of this goddamn generation and this goddamn country, doesn’t think most things need talking about. He’s not gonna tell Rick that there’s something about Rick when he’s sentimental and selfish and even sad that makes him want little more than to fuck him up a little bit. He’s not gonna say things that are true, things like, _most nights I just wanna touch you_ or _I’m drunk and I’m horny so why the hell not_ or _I accidentally built my entire life around you, the least you can let me do is fuck you._ What’s the point in talking like that. What’s the point in talking when you could be doing. 

So that’s what he does. He lets Rick sprawl his body over his on Rick’s sofa and he kisses him with the same lazy focus he did years ago after a hot day shooting in the Mexican sun. It’s certainly not the first time they’ve done this, and Cliff’s certain it won’t be the last. And it’s funny, isn’t it? How some things can mean nothing and everything all at the same time. That’s a paradox, and he supposes that’s Rick, too. The most foolish and honorable son of bitch Cliff’s ever known. The odd thing about it this time though—in the quiet of Rick’s house, the TV muted and flickering over them, a curious desperation Cliff finds is just as much his own as Rick’s—is that it feels less about the physical and more about something as intangible and emotional as companionship. Maybe even love. And sure, Cliff supposes. He loves him. He’s committed himself more to Rick than he has anything else in his life, and if that’s not love, he’s not sure what is. 

He thinks that, as he gets Rick's pants undone, gets his hand cupped flush against him and Rick’s mouth at the corner of the jaw. Rick's breath is a shaky and uncertain thing as he stutters a moan, and after all this time, that hasn’t changed. Each time Rick acts like this is brand new. That it’s borderline impossible that two people such as themselves could come together like this. That it can feel that right. 

And after the year they’ve had, after the decade, maybe he’s not entirely wrong. 

Later that night, they remain slumped against each other, spent. Rick’s fly’s is still open. 

“I know you get tired of hearing me. I know it. It’s just,” Rick’s saying. He waves his hand, the tip of his lit cigarette trailing smoke through the air. “But I get, I get scared, you know? I don’t know what comes next, not anymore.” It takes Cliff a moment to realize there’s a question Rick is asking there. A reassurance.

“Well, man. I don’t rightly know. Tomorrow will come and the next day after that. People will come, people will go. That’s shit, and that’s life. You don’t get to know what all’s gonna come next." He lets his hand ghost down through Rick's hair to cover the nape of his neck. His skin is hot, familiar, to the touch. "But you get to know some things. Take you and me. What comes next? Ah, well. It’ll be the same thing it always was.”

“The same goddamn thing,” Rick says. He nods, a distant smile trying his mouth. “I like that.”


End file.
